


The Edge of the World Pt. 2

by woollen_pharaohs



Series: The Weather [3]
Category: Pond (Australia Band)
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Drug Use, M/M, Substance Abuse, in-text hyperlinks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-31 01:12:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15108665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woollen_pharaohs/pseuds/woollen_pharaohs
Summary: They can barely keep apart anymore. Sometimes they have to for the various projects that they get themselves involved in, but they always find ways back to each other as if they’re magnetised. Polar energy sewn into their blood and bones but together they’re electrifying enough to dispel what would normally repel them. Together they transmute that energy into something else, into music and movement, into a love that’s transcendent.A collection of interconnected nick/jay drabbles for your enjoyment.





	The Edge of the World Pt. 2

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rustleofstars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustleofstars/gifts).



> For Rustleofstars & Ophelia. Thank you for popping into my life and inspiring me to finish writing this nonsense that I had half written a year ago. It's so encouraging to know that there are other people out there who ship these Perth boys! 
> 
> Any mistakes are my own. Enjoy!

 

**Nick.**

It’s in Nick’s nature to never stop moving. Nature, or nurtured. He moved to Derby in The Kimberley region when he was four, a faint memory of seeing the expanse of the country too big for an airplane window. For eight years, Nick got to know all sides of Derby, moving up and down and to the house next door. He spent most days outside getting pink as he would scream up the cracks that gouge through the red earth and race along the fanned out sides of the land in his derby, just horsing around with sticks and rocks and imagining all kinds of things until the sun set and it was time to go home. 

There were no more than 200 kids in his whole school, kindergarten to year 12, and even when Nick was a kid, he always preferred the older kids. They busied themselves with funny little things while Nick had been spending his play alone. Playing cassette tapes on their stereo and fingers greasy with oil and other stuff, and Nick would try to relate to them with stories that weren’t his own. Grand stories he heard from his older sister and brother when they came to visit for Christmas. But his friends never believed him, never believed that his siblings were real either because no one knew they existed in Derby. 

So he would run away and laugh and play by himself as he did, and go down deep into The Kimberley down where the low caves almost licked the sand. He would lie underneath and push his belly up against the gnarly teeth of those stone beasts and watch the rocks  [ loom ](https://assets.worldexpeditions.com/croppedImages/Australasia/Western-Australia/Kimberley-Walking-Tour-371933-1100px-16x7.jpg) over him until a helicopter shone a beam of light on him and his parents thought they ought to move back to Fremantle. 

After the Big Move, Mama took refuge in the weather and the air conditioning that sealed her away from the Big Dry. He missed The Kimberley but there was nothing quite like swimming in liquid aquamarines and being washed upon the white, endless shore. He loved the sea, he loved his new home and new school friends but the threat of the world wasn’t so real when he had laid beneath the gaping mouth of it when he was younger. He had a sense of it, back then, and because of it, he knew what shape it took when the world was breathing down on him. 

He saw a school counsellor once. A private counsellor shortly after. She told Nick that his early travels could have attributed to why he feels so much more than anyone else. But something more than that, something in his biology that makes him ponder on things so much that to avoid it, he makes himself do stupid shit, go places he shouldn’t, hurt himself in ways that nobody should. After he took the medicine she prescribed him, he felt like the transmitters that connected to his brain had their wires cut. He could still pick up on the signals but they were weak crackly tunes on the radio, just out of tune, and quiet enough that he could carry a conversation with the person beside him. 

And that was good, but he didn’t stop moving. 

  
  


**Jay.**

You ever meet a person who’s on another plane of existence? You can see them looking in your direction, but you feel as if they’re not only looking at you. They’re looking around you, at all of the events in your life that trail behind you, all of your horrifically embarrassing moments and heartbreak and even the goodness that squeezes into an upside down funnel and explodes into the prism of you, and this person you’ve met just sees it entirely. Sees all the colours inside you that make your chlorophyll projection, like they are the refracting light that imparts on you, divides you without breaking you apart. 

Jay loves that about Nick. Loves that he doesn’t have to be hugely open on his part in order for Nick to understand him. Loves that nothing much had to be said for them to begin. A mutual attraction, mutual admiration. A swell in his heart that Nick can see from any angle, a swell elsewhere that Nick takes with his eyes closed. 

 

 

**Nick.**

He can be alone. He can enjoy the quiet. He can sit in the dermatologist waiting room and watch the oldies pick at their faces and watch the flakes join flecks of white in the carpet. He can sit by the sea or under rocks or watch birds slide down a slippery-dip. He can bring a bowl of porridge to bed when everyone is asleep and see his crooked teeth in the reflection of his laptop screen. 

But it’s hard. He doesn’t like to be ignored. He sometimes goes months without talking to Jay. It’s how Jay wants it, Nick thinks. They’ll reunite just fine, but in the meantime, Nick misses Jay sorely. Thinks about him all the time. Wants to message him or send him a stupid pic or grins too wide when Jay likes a video of the ocean he put up on instagram, because they’re two in the same - Jay and the ocean. Peaceful and tumultuous, simultaneously. 

He doesn’t want to be annoying. Doesn’t want to scare Jay away anymore than he already has. But he wants him. Jay’s the one person that Nick really doesn’t want to be ignored by, and the months between no contact is so hard to endure, so difficult to keep himself well behaved. So he does a lot, and people think he’s pretty good or something. Praise is nice but Nick doesn’t feel like what he’s doing with Tame is particularly special. It’s why he’s dabbling with Pond and solo stuff and art stuff and trying his hand at poetry stuff. He’s just… he needs to stay active. He feels like if he doesn’t create, he’ll not be himself. He’ll pester. He’ll ask for attention and Jay only has so much to give and that’s fine. There are other people who he can ask, who will give him praise even if he doesn’t ask, but he still wants Jay. 

So Nick keeps going and going and going, like he did in The Kimberley, running and thinking and pressing words into the sand that bunyips read, cloaked in the coolness of the night. And if he can’t create, he gets stuck. He gets really really bad. So bad that he goes back to Derby. He chases a hot breath of a new summer as it makes its fervent expedition through the rocks that break backwards through the dry landscape of The Kimberley. He finds a plastic deck chair crewed beneath a protruded lip of rock and sits underneath or dangles off the lip and watches the paper trees shed their bark. 

He uses the paper to roll a thing or two and after a good huff his fingers make his way to the top of his head where he splays apart sections of hair bleached to death and as dry as the sheets of burnt bark yet to peel. He cyclones his splindy fingers through dead forests and feels them break between his nails and then he runs, the hot inhale of the night pulls him in, his hollow body splits like a crowbar taken to his eyelids, a match taken to his burning gums. 

Bushfires have ripped through these gumtree forests and burnt for weeks and weeks, all because us white fellas never took care of the land. Never let things grow which out to grow and then gone ahead and fed fuel to the fire due to neglect and disrespect, but what could he do about it now when they thought they were doing the right thing? He’s doing what he can but it isn’t enough.

He doesn’t feel good. 

He slips into the lap of a eucalypt way down there in The Kimberley, where the skin of the old gum sheds into a messy pile and where he wants to shed his too. But he doesn’t because he doesn’t want to overwhelm him. Holds the sheddings in his palms with his bleached hair under his fingernails and his own skin so tight it might break off and reveal the black goo that surely lives inside him. 

Nick misses him. Misses the feel of the branches around him and the low whispers he heard when his leaves rustled in the wind and he feels bad, so bad, that he’s maybe been a bit much. The blanket of the world settles over him, the thick blue ceiling deflates and weighs down on him. Forces him up, forces him out. Twisting and slurring words out of his lungs and he goes back to the show and walks on stage to sing in perfect synchrony when he knows he needs to sound alright. Like he’s always been alright. 

  
  


**Jay.**

Nick always say the most profound things. Doesn’t matter if he has his teeth covered in crystals or if he’s as clean as the glass in cathedrals, his brilliance is true. Jay’s appreciative of that, of Nick’s input, and Kev’s input too, and he’s only slightly jealous. Only a little, because he doesn’t believe he’ll ever measure up. His friends are so talented, they make it seem so effortless. And Jay’s always learning from them, contributing a drum beat or a bass line where he can, which evolves under their touch and becomes something better than he could ever have imagined and that’s just how it is. He’s kind of mediocre without them, without Nick. 

And he gets down those trains of thought. Nick waits for him at various train stations, an arm out and a warm smile on his face but sometimes Jay can’t get off not because he doesn’t want to but because he just  _ can’t _ . He goes down the line and lines up his nose and he tries not to do that so much anymore. Talking is hard but it helps and then he gets tired. He’s thankful that Nick’s respectful when it gets too much. For when he feels too seen. Raw. When anything said, casually or well-meaning, peels off another layer of skin so close that he bleeds.

Nick understands when he has to take some time away to heal, and when he’s better, across cities and oceans and sun cracked desert, they come together. Meld together. Long sweaty nights in beds and tents and sandy seashores. Music rehearsed and noise rehashed and made anew, the disagreement they had born into a gift, a riff of a song to write. He’s only sorry that he’s like this. That he’s sore, that it took him so long to admit what Nick meant to him, to own up to the work that he has to do still, the things he needs to learn still in order to be as good to Nick as Nick is to him. 

  
  


**Nick.**

It would be wrong to say that Tame doesn’t mean anything to him. It means a lot. But after a time, Kev makes it clear that Tame isn’t a band. That it isn’t anyone’s but his. And Nick kind of bites back any more ideas that he has because Kev would never take them anyway. Kev’s often right that they don’t work, which is the worst part. It sounds better the way Kev wants it… It’s why Nick needs Pond. He needs a space to be able to make mediocre music and be happy with it. 

So he has that and he has Jay and when Tame starts to get big, they go to Paris. A magical melody wraps around Kev and Nick and Jay eat cheese like their mouths are the wax casings the cheese is suited to fit within. And they fuck in the bathroom of Le Trianon theatre and the rooftop of Melody’s uncle’s chateau and accidentally kick a vespa in a ditch on some country road because Jay forgot to put the brake on while they messed around, too caught up in their bodies pressed together to care for their destination. 

It’s all Nick wants. To be with Jay. He decides there, shortly before they returned for Freo, that he doesn’t want to be in Tame anymore. He wants to make other things more seriously and he thinks that Jay would understand. He thinks that Jay will quit Tame too, but he doesn’t. He tries to explain to Jay, and Kev and the other boys too, that it’s not mean to be an F-you. It’s that he needs something that’s his. He needs the freedom to explore his own ideas and make mistakes and grow and learn and not be commandeered by the brilliance of one man. 

They get it, it’s all good. But it hurts like crazy that Jay stays. Not only because it means being apart from Jay, but now that he’s on the outside, he can see how expendable Kev thinks they all are. Shuffling Jay from instrument to instrument guised as a multi-instrumentalist but the truth is there’s no place for Jay there anymore either. 

It’s all up in the air now - where Jay is in terms of Tame or if Tame is a thing anymore at all. And then Kev comes on board to produce  _ The Weather _ and it resurfaces old conflicts. Nick loves Kev, he does, but the man can be a stubborn bastard. And it’s weird to see them all in the same room again. Hurts him to see how Jay reacts as well.

One time Kev told Jay that when he drummed, he drummed faster as the song went on and he would have to change pace to keep up. Nick knows that Jay never forgot that because he barely touches a drum kit at all anymore. Criticism cuts Gum and the blade snaps off, lodges into his body and costs a heart and a lung to surgically remove it. And Nick thinks that Kev’s input was phenomenal, that it’s the best they’ve ever created, but he thinks he might not do that again. Thinks he’s learnt enough from Ol’ Kev that he might just be able to do without. 

 

 

**Jay.**

He’s better now than he ever was. More confident. Relies less on the idea that he’s simply mediocre and tries to pay heed to the truth that he  _ is actually good  _ at what he does. People had kind of told him and he’d kind of only half believed it and he’s thankful for everyone who has stuck around on his journey of coming to actually believe it too.

He thinks that a bit of ego stroking is alright so long as he treats people well. Loves people the way they love him. Spends time with people he ought to. With Nick the most, because he owes him the world. Holds him and kisses him and hears what he has to say. Says what needs to be said when he hadn’t before. Tells him what they both have been needing to hear. 

On the balcony of some hotel in East London, he fans his hand over the small of Nick’s back and they watch the moon rise out of smog and when the moon blinks away under clouds, he takes Nick back to bed. Relishes the way Nick feels like he melts into him on the way, like he’s forgotten how to walk. The backs of Nick’s legs glue to the front of his and Nick’s neck cranes against his chest and he can feel Nick breathing, hear him whining, kisses an arm that stretches backward to comb a hand through Jay’s hair.

They barely reach the bed, sink at the foot, Nick pulling Jay down as he lowers to his knees. Nick spreads his arms out over the mattress and presses his forehead to the sheets. Jay folds into the shape of Nick, shudders when Nick keens into him and he grinds his swollen cock against NIck’s ass. Jay pushes and Nick pulls and they exhale pleasured moans and inhale needed oxygen all across the UK and Europe and cross-continental too. 

They can barely keep apart anymore. Sometimes they have to for the various projects that they get themselves involved in, but they always find ways back to each other as if they’re magnetised. Polar energy sewn into their blood and bones but together they’re electrifying enough to dispel what would normally repel them. Together they transmute that energy into something else, into music and movement, into a love that’s transcendent. And Jay still finds himself wondering what he did to deserve something so incandescent. 

 

 

**Nick.**

Nick stands on the edge of the world where the Timor Sea kisses a piss stained beach and water washes blue bottles into rock pools. Those little blue balloons glint like the poisonous, gaseous stars that burn through the polluted night, and shift and sway in the water until they burst against the hard parts of the earth. And then the sea brings those worn down creatures amongst the seafoam to fizzle around his toes. 

The salt is making his skin feel tight. His old, saggy skin which used to hang off his thin frame, is now caked to him like the acidic soils in South Australia where nothing can grow and nothing can die away either. But that’s okay because he’s got fertiliser coming in. A forest of friends sprouted all over the world. He’s better with them, like the process of permaculture; plant different things side by side and they work better than you’d think. 

Nick needs his friends. Needs Jay. Needs to be together so that he doesn’t fall apart. He’s tearing at his seams, clawing at his gut and pulling his lungs out in between his ribs and strangling his throat from saying too much and not enough. Takes the good doctor’s medicine to calm him down. To stop those thoughts from going around and around and spinning him out. 

He walks beside the rockpools and watches the dark water rush between two rocky ridges, the forgotten child of The Kimberley. The ones no Australian knows because it’s not  [ Big ](http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/travel/destinations/2017/09/a-list-of-australias-big-things) enough. Suddenly he misses home, old home. He was alone then and good at it too. Just a kid isolated in a hot desert and now the heat islands of cities are inescapable. 

Tires and parks are being eaten up by steel and pavement, edging and edging, invading slowly then yanked out by The Man only for him to be surprised when they cry out, like no one suspected tears could be wept over land lost. Hands on his head, brittle white hairs in his palms. Dry collapse. Buildings are invading here and in every city, like metal braces that force long teeth into place fixing a fake kind of permanence until the weather brushes those buildings, as sturdy as Bleeding Gums, down to rot and ruin. He knows it’s bad but he’ll perish before the fix will fix and he’ll just go on living until his body and the body encasing the billions of souls on the earth can’t take the abuse anymore. 

Long arms wrap around his waist and lift him up. Jamie, his cool cat, growling at him in that crackly, jazzy voice. Jamie grins and brings Nick over to the pit they’ve dug in the sand and lowers him down in front of the fire, his back to the ocean. His friends are gathered here, drawling and smoking and minds colliding and fires exploding in the bellies of the deep underwater volcanoes. Joe rattles off some funny yarn and Jay’s as earnest and sweet, accepting Jamie’s hand to take his position beside Nick, and James misses his girlfriend. Jamie and Joe help again, always so good at cheering anyone up, and oh, Nick loves them. These zany beings hewn of the fibres that constitute serotonin, minus the capsules but plenty of swallowing if it’s Jay in mind. 

Nick lies back on the sand wall and feels the thrumb of the rising tide vibrating across the banks and hears the sea foam smash on the shore and white spraying like angry spit where he can’t see. Carry him out, hands of the ocean. WInd the cord, prickly seaweed around his ankle and undress him so that he may run wild through the metal and peel it back, expose the green beneath and the suffocated history. Movement contrary to the design of cities, to the order imposed in those straight structures. He’ll run with his arms up, fingers spinning, fighting every twilight every twixt and turn that tells him to conform. And he’ll try so very hard not to shed his proverbial skin, lest he forget, and wake up under the sun looking like a melted, spat out roll-up. 

And if he ever tires out, he knows that when he falls into the darkness of the water, the sea of hands will always wave him back to shore, and he’ll find his way back into Jay's arms.


End file.
